Tag Archives: silent film

There’s always a danger, when you’re at a film festival that’s late in the year, that the programme will be a little derivative, a greatest hits of that year’s festival circuit rather than entity of it’s own.

What you do tend to be guaranteed at the Inverness Film Festival that you don’t tend to get at other film festivals I’ve attended, is a highlight from the Bo’ness Silent Film Festival. Some year’s it’ll be a restored print, others it’ll be a newly commission score, almost always it’ll involve live musical accompaniment. I do appreciate that we not only get silent movies here on a reasonably regular basis, but also that when they do show up, you’re pretty much guaranteed a live accompaniment, as for me, that’s one of the primary reasons to see a silent film projected.

This year’s special feature was the 1920 US version of Last of the Mohicans – there have been enough film adaptations of this film it requires a fair amount of disambiguation – with a new score composed and performed by David Allison.

It’s very much a film of it’s time, and as such has all the obvious problems – there’s not an actual American Indian in the piece. However, this is not a film in which white people come out remotely well. Neither the French or English forces cover themselves in glory – the film even openly acknowledging their shameful role in the massacre – and a great deal of the harm that unfolds in the film is the result of white guys being cowardly. Magua is a piece of work throughout, but he’s essentially a spy in a time of war, his ‘betrayal’ is essentially him doing his job.

Strangely, a major theme of the film seems to be men falling in love with Cora and doing horrible things rather than accept that she doesn’t like them back! (The film indulges in a refreshing lack of blaming her on that front, her sister might be described as capricious but Cora’s just got a ‘girlish crush’ on Uncas.) Cora and Uncas instead get a surprisingly sweet courtly, if doomed, romance – I kept hoping in vain that she’d run off with Uncas and leave her useless drip of a sister behind. Sadly, between the plot of the book and the racial conventions of the time, that would never be, but nonetheless, they get all the big romantic moments.

This evening saw that rarest of treats for a silent movie fan, the screening of a new silent film. London Symphony is a love letter of film, both to the city of London and to that beautiful sub-genre of silent films; the city symphony.

From the pristine, gorgeous black and white photography, through the glorious art deco film poster to the bombastic and tender score, this was a film that knows and loves its genre. It’s very much a labour of love film, having been crowd-funded, and having a central creative team that had been at university together and then worked together on short films. (It was originally envisioned as a six-month project but expanded out into a four-year epic.) It’s a film that seeks to document its city subject in the early part of the 21st century in the same way that films like Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis and Man with a Movie Camera did for their own cities respectively in the early part of the 20th century. While stylistically, it arguably owes more to formalism than to the avant-garde sensibilities of those films, it still manages to occupy that middle ground where documentary meets art film, and therefore I feel that it succeeds in its mission. Revealing the machine that is London, along with its all too human flawed and grubby heart, and making it beautiful not despite that but rather because of that.

I love films that hold a deep sense of place, that are embedded with a deep affection for their settings in all their glories and their grubbiness. From the Cat’s Eye view of Istanbul in Kedito the back streets of Kowloon in Chungking Express, I love seeing cities away from the stock footage skylines and familiar vistas. This film was like the kind of tour of a city you get from a friend who lives there rather than the one your get from a tour guide. Where the big tourist attractions are incidental and the focus is instead on their favourite parks and markets, with a liberal sprinkling of odd views and favourite bits of obscure architecture.

As an additional added pleasure the film was followed by a Q&A session with the director Alex Barrett, who is currently touring the film round the country, answering questions both from the audience and from Eden Court’s film programmer Paul Taylor. I think it’s a film that benefits from having added context, whether that’s getting an introduction to the genre of city symphony films or as an opportunity to geek out about the genre with the director.

It was also, more than anything, that most unusual of films for me, one that left me feeling inspired and wanting to make my own film in that genre.

Of all the arts activities that I might have expected to be in plentiful supply when I moved to Inverness, silent films with live musical accompaniment weren’t one of them. I’ve seen half a dozen different films over the last year, and rarely has their live accompaniment been anything as prosaic as a piano. Whether a klezmer band, electronica, a woodwind collective or a jazz trio the performances I’ve seen haven’t been afraid to innovate or push boundaries in interpreting silent movies and the screenings have been universally packed.

I’m personally of the opinion that the best way to watch silent film is with live musical accompaniment. There’s something about live interpretation of a film in music – whether in fitting a pre-prepared score to the film as it spools along, or improvising as they go – that gives silent film a vibrancy that seems to get lost in the cold crispness of a DVD transfer and its pre-recorded soundtrack. Something of the mutability and fragile wonder of the early years of the medium restored to the viewer for a short while.

The first film of my double bill did actually feature the traditional piano based musical accompaniment. And what a feat of piano playing that turned out to be. The Thief of Bagdad is a two and a half hour epic in the old fashioned sense. Despite his massively influential role in Hollywood during the silent era, I’d never actually seen a Douglas Fairbanks picture before – I’m generally more of a Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy type when it comes to early US cinema – and this film really showcases his legendary swashbuckling charm. Despite its unconvincing dragon – there was a good deal of sniggering in the screening – the other special effects are really quite effective and the action sequences quite thrilling. It moves at a cracking pace – the accompaniment certainly helped keep the pace up – and honestly you’d never have known it was as long as it was, there was never a spare moment to get bored in.

The Graeme Stephen Trio appear to have something of a specialism in the works of German Expressionist Cinema. (This year saw them interpreting Faust in Eden Court for Hallowe’en while last year on the same date they were interpreting The Cabinet of Dr Caligari in Perth. They’ve also won prizes for their scoring of Murnau’s Sunrise and recently completed a new score for Metropolis.) The film itself is every bit as dark and strange as one would expect from a meeting of the source material, the director and the general period. It’s set in that weird late semi-Medieval period that I’ve only ever encountered in German cinema – though perhaps it equates to an actual historic period in central Europe, my mainland European history knowledge goes, Rome, Vikings, defeat of Napoleon, German unification so I may be missing some subtleties – and can’t be entirely certain whether or not it actually existed. I’d always thought of Faust as being a story of a scientist/philosopher lead to temptation by a thirst for knowledge. But actually his temptation here is a much more complex affair which I feel made it a much more interesting film.

It’s interesting to note that while I can easily call to mind numerous German film directors of this period, I struggle to name more than one actor – Conrad Veidt for some reason, those compelling eyes probably – whereas in Hollywood at the same time I could reel off numerous stars but the directors’ names are unknown to me. Perhaps it says something about the different film cultures in Europe and the States at the time, that there wasn’t really an equivalent of the star system that was so dominant in the US. Or perhaps this is an artificial distinction wrought by the perspective of being more used to looking at European cinema through the lens of auteur theory. That we associate genres with particular directors in early European cinema, whereas in early Hollywood cinema we associate them with stars. Or perhaps my continuing interest in German expressionism in film and in film noir has just skewed my perspective towards a focus on stylistics.

The main thing that these two films have in common – other than having been made within two years of each other – is that they are essentially adaptions of earlier literary sources. While The Thief of Bagdad is quite a loose adaptation, it plays heavily on the idea of the existing mythos of 1001 Arabian Nights to allow it to make use of tropes and motifs from the genre as shortcuts that require no explanation. Faust on the other hand is much more of a straight up adaptation of Goethe’s novel – how close and accurate an adaptation it is, I cannot tell, as I haven’t read the book. The other major commonality between the two films is how they function as morality plays, where a protagonist of dubious morality has to face the very real consequences of his sins to someone he cares for and is given the opportunity to redeem himself.

First things first: I finally saw Taxi to the Dark Side. A film that I’ve owned since late 2008 – and in fact the film that kicked off what has become an annual tradition on the blog, reviewing the year’s films. I’ve ended nearly every annual review since then with the guilty admission that I still hadn’t seen the film that kicked everything off. But no more! In another apparent developing tradition for me I squeezed a last documentary film in on New Years Eve to ensure I made my documentary target for that year. (Actually I squeezed in two, watching The Celluloid Closet in the morning and Taxi to the Dark Side in the evening.) Last year I decided to bump up my target from twelve feature-length documentaries to fifteen. And once again I made it! I’ve now entirely demolished my backlog of documentaries on DVD so that’s its own kind of victory.

Disappointingly only one of the documentaries I saw this year was a 2015 release (Very Semi-Serious), though a fair number of documentaries this year were released last year (Palio, The Damned: Don’t You Wish that We Were Dead, Last Days in Vietnam, Electric Boogaloo: The Cannon Films Story and Limited Partnership). I saw a smattering of really old documentaries. And by really old, I mean, silent documentaries from the days when cinema was still trying to figure out what documentaries were going to be and where the line between fact and fiction would be drawn. Nanook of the North and Häxan were both released in 1922 while Salt for Svanetia is from 1930. All three of them with new reimagined scores performed live. There were a smattering of ‘classic’ documentaries from the 80s and 90s (Burroughs, The Times of Harvey Milk and The Celluloid Closet) along with some more recent fare that I missed the first time round in the cinema (Being Elmo and Taxi to the Dark Side). There’s no real explanation for Circus Elephant Rampage other than it was in the Storyville strand and looked interesting.

There wasn’t really an overall theme to documentaries that I saw this year. (Other than, it was on and looked interesting.) Given my current location I think I’m going to have to accept that for the foreseeable future I’m just not going to get to see documentaries on their first release – my local arts cinema is really good about getting in a varied selection of documentaries, but the law of limited prints means that they don’t get them promptly. (Though they are much better attended than documentaries were in Stirling.) On the other hand, I heard very little about upcoming documentaries this year so I’m not really sure what I was actually missing this year.I know there was Citizen Four about Edward Snowden and his revelations but other than that, not so much. Most documentaries I was aware of small independent documentaries that I’m looking forward to arriving later this year, but the bigger ‘break-out’ documentaries have been fewer and further between this year than for many years.

The best documentaries I saw this year were Being Elmo (sweet, touching, gentle film about puppeteers and especially the very particular world of the puppeteers of the Jim Henson studios), Limited Partnership (a warm and heart-breaking film about one couple’s fight to have their marriage recognised) and Palio (fascinating, unsentimental and unsensational film about horse racing, corruption, greed and honour). An honourable mention for Taxi to the Dark Side, which was excellent, but I think it has lost a lot of its impact due to what we now know about the extent of the brutal shenanigans going on with rendition and ‘enhanced’ interrogation.

This year I plan to up my documentary viewing to 20 feature-length documentaries. As I have a clean slate on the documentary front I think that I’ll also go for a theme of seeing as many Oscar winning documentaries as I can and see if I can investigate what it is that makes a documentary award worthy.